As the author of books documenting the last days of the famous dog track at Walthamstow Stadium and the battle for survival faced by shopkeepers on one East End street, Katherine Green is something of an expert at capturing histories before they fade.

Green has spent the past six years talking to the British Olympic Team from 1948 – the previous time the Games came to London – for a touring show which reflects a different world.

In post-war London, the exclusively amateur athletes trained on rations, working full-time and raising children before taking unpaid leave to compete in kits they had sewn by hand.

Dorothy Partlett, nicknamed “the secretary from Essex”, won silver in the 100 metre sprint, and Dorothy Tyler competed in the High Jump at three Games, winning silver in Berlin in between driving for the army (she still plays golf competitively).

George Weedon, whose accomplished ballroom dancing also gets an honourable mention, was a gymnast and springboard diver qualified in acrobatic ballet, although he might envy the achievements of Gordon Thomas – a cyclist who scored silver for the team road race and went on to win the Tour of Britain in 1953 – and Denise St Aubyn Hubbard, a High Diver who translated Japanese at Bletchley Park, became the only female skipper in the Royal Navy Auxilary Service for eight years and, incredibly, sailed single-handed across the Atlantic at the age of 64.

The Games seems to have been the tip of the athletic iceberg for some of these sports stars: a freestyle wrestler later became a lumberjack in New Zealand, a footballer turned pro with Scottish team Queen of the South after the Games, and 1948 swimming team captain Roy Romain, a pioneer of the butterfly stroke, swam competitively until his 90s before passing away in 2010.

From Surrey to Shipley, those he left behind are still on fine form in these pictures. “It has been a great privilege to spend time in the company of such interesting and modest people,” says Green.